From the Mystery Lovers Book of Quotations

Liberal principles are all very fine as long as they leave you with something to have principles about. -- Jack Higgins

Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house. -- Rachel Ingalls

It's hard to live a reputation down. Especially when your actions live up to it. -- Michael Z. Lewin

A prompt man is a lonely man. - Elmore Leonard

You know who casts the first stone? The guiltiest bastard in the crowd. -- William McIlvanney

Life is the process of finding out, too late, everything that should have been obvious to you at the time. -- John D. MacDonald, "The Only Girl in the Game"

We gave her everything. But it wasn't what she wanted. -- Ross MacDonald, "The Underground Man"

Sanity is sometimes a matter of going on, outwardly, as if everything is all right. -- Mary McMullen, "Prudence Be Damned"

People without brains are always dangerous. -- A.E.W. Mason, "The House of the Arrow"

Everybody needs a little improbability in their life. -- Reginal Hill, "Deadheads"

Read This

I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly, there is a tendency for the world to say to America the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out, and then to worry when America wants to sort them out. -- Tony Blair

"How about you?" asked Christopher. "Are you happy?"
"Yes. More than happy. Content."
"Perhaps that's the secret."
"Contentment?"
"Yes. Instead of asking, 'Are you happy?', perhaps what people should really ask is, 'Are you content?'"
"Isn't that like resignation? Like giving in?"
"I don't think so. I think it's about getting in touch with reality. About balancing aspirations and actuality."
--Alan Titchmarsh, "Love and Devon"

Favorite Author Quote from Martha Grimes:"It's just like family, her people. It's the kind of thing these new writers don't understand, that readers want to feel this is a family they can walk and talk amongst. Writers these days only want to write about breakups and breakdowns, everything unraveling and everybody going to the devil."

A Rather Successful President

Conrad Black of Canada's National Post, in case you missed it:

Conrad Black: A 'rather successful' president with some serious achievements under his belt

An cataract of sniggering and brickbats may safely be expected as serious analysis of the presidency of George W. Bush begins, but it will not last: The historical standing of departing presidents tends to rise as emotionalism subsides.

The U.S. annual economic growth rate has been 2.2% through this presidency, the highest of any advanced country, and the economy expanded 19% in this time, well ahead of other large economies. The same pattern was replicated in per-capita income and spending, investment of all kinds and unemployment, which ran at half a percent below the average of the Clinton years and three full points below the Eurozone.

Until the last three months of his eight-year presidency, Bush avoided a recession. It is clear now that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury will prevent deflation and maintain the money supply by topping up the monetary base as credit contracts. They are already kick-restarting commercial and personal lending. They will, if necessary, propel the banking system by the scruff of the neck and the small of the back toward its real function, sensible lending, and not being hosed out of their shareholders’ underwear by imaginative, self-destructing derivative instruments, invented by the now defunct and largely unlamented U.S. investment-banking industry. George W. Bush will not be tagged with a lingering economic depression as Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover were.

Bush’s treaty with India, creating an alliance with that country, is one of the most important diplomatic initiatives in the world since Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. But the chief preoccupation of the Bush administration has been the conflict with terrorists and terrorism-promoting states. All who remember 9/11 will recall the very high concern that, as bin Laden promised in his belligerent videos at the time, there would be imminent and frequent sequels. Yet not so much as a firecracker has gone off in the Americas since then, and President Bush deserves much credit that he has not received for this fact. Despite the current outrage in India, international terrorist action has not been a fraction of what had been feared. Terrorist organizations have been severely damaged, by the United States or with American assistance, in many infected countries.

Ironically, the issue that will mainly determine the historical ranking of the Bush presidency, the fate of Iraq, lies largely in the hands of Barack Obama. If Iraq endures as a powerful and effective anti-terrorist ally, a pro-Western regime with some power-sharing, and an alternative government model to the corrupt theocracies and secular despotisms that infest the Arab world now, the geo-strategic impact will be as immensely positive to the West as the Iranian revolution was a severe setback.

As long as the West imports large quantities of oil, it is extremely dangerous to have both major Persian Gulf countries, Iran and Iraq, in hands hostile to the West. Saddam Hussein and the Iranian Khomeinists between them, had the Saudis, Emirates and the other Gulf states quaking in their metaphorical sandals.

Those who opposed Bush’s insertion of 30,000 more soldiers into Iraq in the Surge of January 2007, and have consistently denied that it would succeed, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, are still officially in denial. Some have claimed that Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is effectively an Iranian puppet. This, they allege, is why he overtly supported Obama in the U.S. election, because he wants the United States out in 16 months to facilitate the oppression of the Sunnis and the Kurds, by the Shiites, under the sponsorship of Shiite Iran. The litmus test is the integration into the Iraqi security forces of the Sunni “Awakening,” the militias and para-militaries that under U.S. blandishments, deserted al-Qaeda.

Whatever the president-elect thinks of the Iraqi initiative of his predecessor, he must be too intelligent to throw away the fruits of a military campaign that has made such dramatic progress. This is not a blood-letting impasse with draftee forces like Korea and Vietnam. In any scenario except the complete domination of all Iraq by Iran, the United States will be a long way ahead of where it was in the Middle East on September 12, 2001.

More than this, President Bush has restored the credibility of American conventional deterrence. Bin Laden and other radicals mocked the aversion of the United States to casualties, and said the U.S. would cut and run in Iraq, as it was deemed to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Instead, al-Qaeda has been expelled from Iraq and has been driven into caves in Pakistan. No one can contest the staying power and effectiveness of the U.S. military; its professional performance has been extremely high.

Unilateralism has not been an unalloyed success, but the point had to be made that the United States will not wait on anyone else before using force in what it considers to be its national security interest. Particularly, it will not accept that its forces can be deployed only with the prior permission of those historic exemplary upholders of international law, Germany, Russia, China and France.

I believe that something important and useful will come from the Iraqi operation, and that George W. Bush will ultimately be seen as a rather successful president. For the benefit of skeptics, I might add that this thesis — expanded into its current form at the request of my editor — has been my publicly stated view since well before there was any thought of asking this president to redress, in my own case, the failings of the American justice system.

Comments

He said, much more coherently than I have, what I have believed for some time. Despite President Bush's unfavorable rating in the polls, I do think--and hope--that he will be viewed much more positively, in the future. And I'm betting not many who have served under this Commander-in-Chief have been included in the polls. I'd be interested in somebody's polling only members of the military, in the past 8 years, to see how they would rate his presidency. I'm guessing they'd give him higher marks.

Thinking of Breeding Your Pet?

The Harp Is a Beautiful Instrument of Torture

Favorite Quotes

The self-delusion of liberalism is bottomless. It blithely celebrates the inane though no less destructive nihilism of Woodstock while treating as nihilistic traitors serious, property-holding, taxpaying citizens who protest a statist takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy. - George Neumayr

You can tell the Democrats are in trouble when a naïve hockey mom from Alaska can appear out of nowhere and wrestle the entire Democratic Party to the ground. - Christopher Chantrill

...Western hand-wringers, the great progressive liberals of the Western world, would rather wring their hands, or like Darfur, hold some ... interpretive dance event to save Darfur every week for the next thirty years. The uselessness of liberal outrage is one of the great constants of the modern world. --Mark Steyn

"America, not Europe, is now the sanctuary of culture; civilization's very existence depends upon America, upon the actuality of American life, and not the ideals of the American Dream. To criticize the actuality upon which all hope depends thus becomes a criticism of hope itself." -- Delmore Schwartz, 1958

"I've got nothing to do and I'm doing it tomorrow." --Elaine Stritch

"...He is, like all great funny men, inconsolable." --John Lahr describing a famous comedian

In taking our self-examining ethos to these extremes, we have lost a kind of wisdom, wisdom that acknowledges the complexity of human life but can move through it to find the simple truth again. While assessing the intricate failings of our moral history, many of us have lost sight of the simple truth that the system that shapes us is, in fact, a great one, that it has moved us inexorably to do better and that it's well worth defending against every aggressor and certainly against as shabby and vicious an aggressor as we face today. -- Andrew Klavan

The elites in Washington, D.C., New York City and the United Nations seem to have plotted a journey to lead America into the New World Order where a cosmopolitan global citizen is no more connected to his country than a sociopath to his fellow man. -- Dimitri Vassilaros

"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark." --Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, 1983-2005

Anything that doesn’t show Americans as stupid, selfish, warmongering, religious bigots, half of them living in pampered luxury in garish purpose-built Italianate mansions, the other half downtrodden in the ghetto by Halliburton stock-owning fat-cats, isn’t going to make it to the front pages or the Ten O’Clock News. --Gerard Baker

In Their Own Words: Democrats on W.M.D.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., December 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."

Robert Einhorn, Clinton assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, March 2002: "How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously -- and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."

Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, February 1998: "He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983."

...without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again... [It's} hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.--New York Times Editorial Board

Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.--Ted Kennedy & Robert Byrd in 2002

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force—if necessary—to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.--John Kerry in 2002

Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.--Al Gore in 2002

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.--Al Gore in 2002

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.--Sen. Hillary Clinton

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.--Nancy Pelosi